METS, the Middle English Texts Series

I checked out the Alliterative Morte Arthure ( https://metseditions.org/read/KWj7bbRIl0RBUmG9uG60zTv8Wak97Z... ).

I'm charmed by the Middle English footnoting style of providing glosses for words that may trouble the modern-English-speaking reader without bothering to note which words those glosses are for.

However, this edition isn't typeset correctly, and the glosses are appearing attached to the wrong lines. (At least, I'm assuming that "great", glossing an empty line, is meant to gloss "grete" on the following line, and "shameful deeds", on the line "And the precious prayer / of his pris Moder" is actually meant to gloss the following line "Sheld us fro shamesdeede / and sinful workes".)†

This is a pretty serious problem.

More generally, these appear to be edited critical editions, and I wish academic texts would actually display the text of the work they represent. I don't mind displaying a standardized "editor's rendering", but show the actual text too. I want to know what the scribe wrote. This is an electronic reference. We can afford the space.

† Tangentially, it's also interesting that "sinful" counts as alliterating with "shield" and "shame".

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Heh. I looked into the display. There are two different documents, text and glosses, and they're supposed to be synched up by matching <br> tags.

This could actually work, because the panel for the text has a hardcoded width of 487 px regardless of window size. But they've blown it by including a sentence at the beginning of the text that is more than one line long - even though they know exactly how long a line is - and ignoring that in their emission of <br> tags. So every line of text is pushed down by one line, and the same isn't true of the glosses.

The correct way to do this is to have the glosses in the same document as the text:

    And the precious prayer  of his pris<div class="gloss">excellent</div> Moder

Or if you need separate documents, you could have a table and put glosses in the same row as the line they're glossing. The text is already displayed in a table - but there's just one row, with one cell for line numbers, one for the text, and one for the glosses.

> many noble clerkes have endevoyred them to wryte and compyle many notable werkes and historyes to the ende that it myght come to the knowlege and under­stondyng of suche as ben ygnoraunt, of which the nombre is infenyte.

From The Game and Playe of the Chesse, which I misread as cheese and clicked on out of bafflement. It’s a book of moral lessons to be drawn from the chessmen.

One of the fascinating things about middle English for modern readers is that spelling was somewhat arbitrary. I suppose the literacy rate so low back then that the community of people blessed with the skill of reading and writing got to make up their own rules.

I received a METS edition of the Prose Merlin as a kid. Lots of fun reading that book. Indeed the arbitrary and self-inconsistent spelling was initially a turn off, but now I see it as more of a fuzzy orthography.

I like alternating between reading in a made up Middle English accent and reading as if it were modern English, which works because its prose not poetry where the rhyming and metre be all off.